Demographics of attractiveness subreddits

r/Rateme and r/amiugly: a brief introduction

Attractiveness rating subreddits: what are they?

There exist many subreddits with the purpose of providing people with insight on their attractiveness. Users post one or more photos of themselves, stating their age and gender (a 20-year old male might write “20M”, “M-20”, or some variation). Commenters then rate their appearance: on a scale of 1-10 for r/Rateme, and simply answering the question of “Am I ugly?” on r/amiugly.

Rating mechanisms

r/Rateme posters ask to be rated on a 10 point scale, while r/amiugly posters ask people to answer the question: "Am I ugly?”.

Age minimums

Subreddit rules state the minimum ages for posting. On r/Rateme, the minimum is 18. For r/amiugly, it’s 16.

The data

Using praw, I scraped a sample* of 1,000 recent posts from each subreddit, then programmatically categorized posters’ age and gender. The final sample: 930 r/Rateme posts and 711 r/amiugly posts.

---

Contributor age and gender

They’re young.

The average ages of r/rateme and r/amiugly posters were 22.2 and 20.6 years old, respectively. On both subreddits, over 90% of posts came from those under the age of 30.

By far, the most common stated age on r/Rateme was 18, indicating that younger teens likely lie to meet the minimum.

They’re mostly male.

Both subreddit samples leaned heavily male, r/amiugly slightly more so). While Reddit as a whole is predominantly male, these subreddits do lean 10+ points more male than estimates.

Gender disparity in comments received

Posters who said they were female received, on average, far more comments than males.

With the subreddit (and Reddit overall) being more male, this might not come as a surprise, as users may be inclined to rate the opposite sex.

The disparity in comments was slightly less drastic on r/AmIUgly; it’s possible that people are more sympathetic there due to the almost pleading nature of the subreddit’s prompting question. Or perhaps males are more willing to answer the question “am I ugly” than they are to rate the same gender.